How do I make my mutual fund portfolio defensive before a market correction?

You cannot time a correction, but you can build a portfolio that falls less and recovers faster — by tilting toward funds with low downside risk instead of chasing last year's top returns. The cleanest single measure for that is the Sortino ratio, which rewards funds that earned their returns while falling less in down markets; the live leaderboard below ranks large cap funds on exactly that, recomputed from AMFI data every refresh.

In practice a defensive tilt has a few levers. Anchor your equity core in large caps, which historically fall less than mid and small caps. When comparing funds, look at Sortino and beta (market sensitivity) alongside returns, not returns alone. Hold a portion in debt, hybrid or multi-asset funds as a cushion that does not move with equities. And keep your SIPs running — a correction is when a SIP buys the most units for the same money.

One honest caveat: “defensive” means falling less, not not falling. In a real correction almost every equity fund drops, and the biggest long-run mistake is selling at the bottom to escape the pain. The goal of a defensive portfolio is to make the drawdown survivable so you stay invested; rebalancing back to your target allocation beats reacting to headlines. This is research, not investment advice.